Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/242

228  and exultation by the leaders of religious thought, whereas the work of Mr. Darwin, hardly more than an expansion of Cabell's Unity, in which the same arguments and many of the same instances appeared, was denounced with all the vigor of ecclesiastical vituperation. The reason for this difference in reception is not easily seen.



HE recent meeting of the International Congress of Geologists at St. Petersburg has led incidentally to an important series of publications regarding the geological features of a large portion of European Russia, the Urals, and the Caucasus. Everything connected with the meeting was arranged upon a most extensive and liberal scale, and especially the great series of excursions before and after the congress. For these there was prepared a set of handbooks, describing the leading points of geological structure and economic importance, and bringing together a great body of results of recent study, either unpublished before or scattered through various Russian and German periodicals and transactions, and practically inaccessible to the ordinary student. These handbooks or "guides" were prepared with great care by a number of prominent Russian geologists, who divided the routes of the excursions into sections, and went over them in detail during the previous year. When completed the reports were translated into French (a few into German) and beautifully printed as octavo pamphlets. These, to the number of thirty-four, were bound together in a volume of six hundred and forty-eight pages, with a spring cover, such that each paper could be taken out and used separately during that part of the journey which it described.

The general editor, Prof. Th. Tschernytschew, observes, in his very modest introduction, that this is the first publication of the kind that has been issued in Russia; and while it can not be placed in comparison with such great general works as have appeared in other lands, like Oldham's Geology of India, Woodward's Geology of England and Wales, or Lepsius's Geologie von Deutschland, he hopes that it may yet present to students a more complete and "